Free Mind Entrepreneur Network
Spring 2023
Fellow: Julianna Kissinger
Christian McCarry, Jack Botto, Jonathan Fritz, Paige Jansen
INTRODUCING THE FREEMIND PODCAST
Community Partner
Stacey Torrance is the founder of Free Minds Entrepreneur Network. Stacey’s ability to overcome being incarcerated and then start this network is what makes him stand out from others. Stacey's goal for The Free Mind Entrepreneur Network was to highlight previously incarcerated individuals who, despite all the hardships they faced in their lives, were still able to move forward and be successful. During this semester, through a podcast format, Stacey had open conversations with other previously incarcerated individuals who now run their own business. This allowed for Stacey and the participants to create an open space for them and their viewers to talk about these topics online.
Design Question
Our design question is, “how do we create a space that allows Stacy and the Free Minds Entrepreneur Network, to both reach their target audience and engage with a new like-minded community?” We created questions regarding the content, style, and details of the podcast that we could ask Stacey and discuss with him that allowed us to achieve the goal and work cohesively on the podcast. While Stacey has an active and growing network, he wanted a platform that allows him to inspire and inform further. We utilized our technical skills and knowledge in order to assist Stacey with recording equipment and editing software in order to create a podcast that grows the Free Minds community, based on the answers to the directional discussion questions we formulated.
Strategic Thinking
Throughout the process of creating the podcast with the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network we worked directly with the head Stacey Torrence to find out what he wanted out of the podcast. He wanted a podcast where he could inspire and inform his audience members in entrepreneurship. Though Free Mind is focused around formerly incarcerated individuals, the focus was to be on the entrepreneurial side of the non-profit. Knowing this, we looked at podcasts with similar subjects. One of them, the “Escaping the Odds” podcast, is one that is directly related with the formerly incarcerated aspect. It is a smaller podcast because of the more niche subject. The bigger one we looked at was “Entrepreneurs on Fire” which brought in the broader entrepreneur community. Something that we looked at was the story we wanted to tell from the Organizational Storytelling activity. It guided how we wanted to set up each episode and what we were going for. We set up the topics of each episode, but let Stacey and his guests take the conversation where they wanted to which included their incarceration experience. In the end, we recorded 4 episodes, doing final editing with Adobe Audition and using Canva for promotional material.
Co-Creation
Stacey Torrance is the founder of Free Minds Entrepreneur Network. Stacey’s ability to overcome being incarcerated and then start this network is what makes him stand out from others. Stacey's goal for The Free Mind Entrepreneur Network was to highlight previously incarcerated individuals who, despite all the hardships they faced in their lives, were still able to move forward and be successful. During this semester, through a podcast format, Stacey had open conversations with other previously incarcerated individuals who now run their own business. This allowed for Stacey and the participants to create an open space for them and their viewers to talk about these topics online.
Results
For the past 12 weeks, the overarching goal of the Beautiful Social Free Minds Entrepreneur Network team has been to create original podcast interviews of Stacy Torrance talking to the members of the Free Minds network showcasing their stories and businesses to increase awareness and outreach into the Philadelphia community.
In the end, we ended up recording four different podcast episodes with video, three of them with outside guests. The plan is to have Stacey release the episodes on different streaming platforms including Spotify and Youtube.
We hope that our work this semester will increase overall traffic to their media platforms while also bringing a further sense of validity and density to the Network.
